Some time ago I made the decision to go back to using an RSS reader. How quaint, you might think! But this antiquated technology has one massive benefit over anything else out there today: it is the only thing that allows me to be my own careful curator. Thing is, I am totally fed up with social media, in all their shape and forms. At the end of the day, social media is just one big ongoing barney about absolutely everything, and of no real consequence for anything at all.

For a while I hoped that Mastodon could fix things, but found it wanting, and in some ways more than what came before. Mastodon solves one thing, and one thing alone: it curtails the worst of the social media toxicity through offering both the individual and the server admins tools for aggressive moderation. But outright toxicity is not the only problem with social media and in other regards Mastodon is not that very different from other social media setups, and in some it is actually worse.

The problems are multilayered, but on a basic level, the federation model itself doesn’t work, we should have really learnt the lesson long time ago with email (and, of course, bitcoin): genuine federation only exists when there is a parity of size among the service providers. In the Mastodon case the experience is heavily skewed toward the big instances — the instance is a window onto the world, and a small instance is but a tiny keyhole (most folk on Mastodon do not grasp this, and raising it is rather unpopular).

The situation is further exacerbated by the liberal moderation controls available to Mastodon instance admins. Individual server-level policies mean that the federation across the ecosystem is very loose and fragile, and as an end user my ability to connect with people (and to remain connected with them) is completely hostage to those fluid policies. My big frustration was not being able to find a suitable instance to follow all the people I’d have liked, and yet to get a reasonable window onto the rest of the fediverse.

Next, the absence of the ‘algorithm’ and relying on boosting alone means that individual reach is very limited, because boosting went out of fashion with the first ex-Twitter migration. This in turn massively skews the timelines in favour of people with very large follower lists (the same way the whole ecosystem is skewed toward very big instances), so that if you are interested in following a particular, moderately popular, subject, your timeline will end up dominated by a small number of people even if you choose not to follow them. This is pretty similar to how the old social media behaves, and why the ‘influencer’ is a thing.

Echo-chamberisation, which leads to, at times extreme, detachment from reality, is a generic problem of all social media, but on Mastodon the aggressive moderation, combined with seeing everything through the instance filter means it is very pronounced. If you have an account on, say, mastodon.scot you could be forgiven for thinking that being pro-independence in Scotland is the overwhelmingly dominant popular position (for the record I am a definite ‘aye’, but nationwide it’s about 50/50, and has been for a long time). Move a server, you get a different perspective, but not necessarily less skewed one.

But my biggest issue with all social media, and in this regard Mastodon is exactly the same, has been not being able to adequately shape the content of the feed to prevent it from being hijacked away from what I am interested in toward what the influencers (i.e., the folk with big follower numbers) want to talk about. You just can’t avoid having your feed overrun by crap like the US elections, to just pick a random example.

To be completely honest, I don’t believe social media can be fixed, the Mastodon effort is a valiant one, and kudos where it’s due, but it proves the point. I think it’s a problem of scale, human discourse simply doesn’t scale beyond a small number of participants. The pre-social media technologies didn’t aim for the global scales, and that’s their strength.

Which brings me back to RSS. My plea is, if you go into the trouble of writing a blog, please make an RSS feed available, if you don’t you are missing out on the next revolution, for I am not the only one heading down this route.

(The next station is IRC, please make sure to take all your belongings with you …)